Thursday, June 28, 2012

On JMG Le Clezio's Desert

A glimpse at the list of winners of the
Nobel Prize in Literature in the last decade shows that the Swedish committee
that adjudicates the prize is often willing to honour highly feted, widely
read, and hotly tipped writers who for years have had “Nobel Prize” tagged to
their names. VS Naipaul is one such case, and so are JM Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk and Mario Vargas Llosa.

But just as often the committee throws up a
name that the vast majority of readers have never heard of, and to my mind this
is the more interesting, exploratory side of its work. Who had heard of the
Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz or the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek before
they won the award in 2002 and 2004 respectively? Who indeed, at least in the
Anglophone world, could claim at the time of announcement to have read anything
by the 2008 winner, the Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio? What the committee is saying, in effect, is that great literature, always being the work of an individual mind, can come from all kinds of unlikely places. Prizes like the Nobel can be a way of equalizing the iniquities of the literary market and the entrenched power of certain languages and cultures in the world today.

Le Clézio (many of whose works are now available
once again in English translation after being out of print for some three
decades), is an especially difficult writer to slot because, in addition to the
difficulty and often wilful obscurity of his work, there is the difficulty and
obscurity of his biography. Although he was born in France, and writes in
French, he also claims allegiance to Mauritius, where one side of his family
comes from, and where he still lives part of the year.

A restless wanderer from
the days of his youth, he seems not to have needed a “home” for his work, not
to have cultivated a relationship with a single place or culture as most
novelists do. Indeed, his itinerancy – he has spent time in and written books
set in Mauritius, France, Mexico, Panama, and Africa, a world writer if there
ever was one – might seem to resemble that of Naipaul, except that he mostly
writes fiction, and his work is much more sympathetic to the marginalised
people and cultures who are his subjects than Naipaul, with his glowering eye,
is.

Among the distinctive emphases of Le Clézio’s
writing is his engagement with what he has called cultures “broken by the
modern world” – all the tribes and peoples thrown out of joint by the encounter
with colonialism, Western rationalism, and the power of the nation-state (a
good parallel in an Indian context might be someone like Mahasweta Devi or
Gopinath Mohanty, both of whom have written extensively about the problems of
Indian tribals). This willingness to move across a boundary, to invert a
dominant power relationship, and to imagine the life of the “other”
sympathetically from within is best seen in Le Clézio’s work in his novel Desert(1980), one the
central novels in his oeuvre and now translated into English for the first time
by C. Dickson.

Set in Morocco and in France, and spanning a century
in time, Desert is the story of a
warrior tribe of the desert, called “the blue men”, and their flight from
French occupying forces in the early part of the twentieth century. Le Clézio
depicts a group of people ceaselessly making their way forward like ants in the
vast, arid and spirit-breaking desert, seeking a place of refuge where they can
consolidate their resources and turn once again towards the lost homeland. In
counterpoint, Le Clézio also tells the story, set in the present day, of a girl
from the same tribe, Lalla, who flees the desert to escape a marriage she does
not want and arrives in France, a vulnerable immigrant.

A great traveller himself, Le Clézio here produces a
very close and painstaking description of human beings on the move across a
landscape. His attention to the constantly shifting and turning shapes of the
universe – no other novelist spends as much time detailing the changing colours
of the sky, or the particularities of the light – turns his story into a cosmic
drama. Le Clézio is also one of those writers who work absolutely on their own
terms. His book is slow-moving and often difficult going, but the writing is frequently
beautiful and alert, as when he speaks of the wind that “draws the yellow
grasses aside like a hand passing over them”, or hears “the faint swish of sand
running down the grooves in the rocks” on a cliff. If you consider yourself an
ambitious reader, there’s no reason to deny yourself an encounter with this
very independent-minded and distinctive sensibility.

"The Vice-Principal" , a story by the Iranian writer Houshang Moradi-Kermani , is one of the most tender and sublime comedies I...

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My books: Arzee the Dwarf

Named one of "60 Essential Works of Modern Indian literature in English" by World Literature Today. Shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Book Award 2010. Published in German (DTV) and Spanish (Plataforma) translations in 2012